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I don't think this guy's blog tries to sell me on a subscription enough. Maybe he could add even more pop-ups or inline pleas for funding. I'm sure he's got a newsletter he's desperate to monetize.


> Rewrite this Python code to use match/case instead of if/elif/else chains

Is this a real example of something people use AI to do? If so, I don't understand why that's difficult, because prompting the AI to do stuff with ASTs etc. seems a bit over the top.


Why?

Are people actually using AI to do programmatic refactors over million line codebases directly? That is far more insane.

Using AI to write ruff rules or clang-tidy rules with fixes is literally the same thing and obviously best practice over running AI in a pre-commit hook to do those checks and refactors...


> I forget that what I miss was not the system, but the community on the system.

Same. I had VMS running on an AS200 next to a beautiful X terminal, just like the computer lab at school. But my dad wasn't sitting next to me, hunting and pecking away at his old C.Itoh terminal. None of the usual suspects were across the table, locked into their favorite MUDD. And so on. I miss them all so much.


Whenever the nostalgia kicks in hard, I fire up OpenVMS 7.2 on the virtual 11/780 in my cheap Motorola phone, then SSH in.

I love OpenSimH and Termux.


Cluster that sucker. I got a pair of MicroVAX 3900s in a VMScluster, actually using the same disk image, just like they'd use the same physical disk in the old days. ALLOCLASS, bb.

Somewhere, the OpenSimH docs say it'll corrupt the image, so ymmv.


Comedy is dead. I can't believe so many folks didn't clock this post.

(Also, the word is "cue", as in "signal". English sucks.)



Don't concurrency. forget about


Every time I click in the window, the menu disappears. I tried both Firefox and Chrome.


Thanks for that report! It is hopefully fixed now.


> Tree-sitter that just works

Hallelujah and thank you, sweet little baby Jesus. Now I can get rid of this bullshit from my dotfiles:

    rm -rf ~/.emacs.d/tree-sitter
    mkdir -p ~/.emacs.d/tree-sitter
    set _plat = windows
    if ( `uname` == Linux ) set _plat = linux
    if ( `uname` == Darwin ) set _plat = apple
    set _arch = x86
    if ( `arch` == arm64) set _arch = aarch64
    gh release -R emacs-tree-sitter/tree-sitter-langs download -p "*${_arch}*${_plat}*"
    tar -C ~/.emacs.d/tree-sitter --transform 's/^\(.*\.\(so\|dylib\|dll\)\)/libtree-sitter-\1/' -xzf tree-sitter-grammars*.tar.gz
    rm tree-sitter-grammars*.tar.gz
That's csh, BTW, just like the Founding Fathers intended.


This is a gift to reactionary gerrymandering and voting restriction efforts, along with things like yesterday's FBI raid of an Ohio voting rights organization.

https://www.statenews.org/government-politics/2026-06-12/ohi...

Representative Joyce Beatty is from Ohio and was instrumental in stopping Trump from illegally renaming the Kennedy Center.

https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/2026/06/kennedy-center-b...


Representative Beatty serves her own interests and her involvement Kennedy Center naming was just more of the same performative politics she routinely engages in. She's on the verge of being an octogenarian and missed a number of key votes, like the bill that cut funding to NPR, PBS, and other govt. programs. Kudos to her for working to remove Trump's name from the Kennedy Center but she needs to go.


The removal of his name is not performative since we're in the thick of a cult of personality president (at a bare minimum).


> quite annoying

It's also quite stable, which you'd think more people would prize given the recent and on-going supply chain attacks.


Stable as in unchanging, sure.

Stable can also mean "you get to keep all the bugs present in this version for the next 4+ years"


Or worse, the kernel moves beyond the package in the repo so a year and a half later it doesn't even work anymore.

VirtualBox is really bad about this.


Given the recent dramatic uptick in vulnerability discoveries, it's also prone to being quite insecure...


LTS still typically get security updates. That's what the support in long term support means.


This gets thrown around a lot, but it's not entirely true. Depending on the particular distro, only certain core packages are likely to get updates on LTS releases. Non-core packages may just get left to rot until the next LTS release. Specifically Ubuntu follows this. A lot of their non-core packages just get imported from Debian and then just sit unmaintained until next release (this goes doubly if not using Ubuntu Pro).


Especially frightening when you look at how much everyday stuff is actually in the Universe repo in Ubuntu. Without Ubuntu Pro, your LTS system can sit in a very insecure state for a long time as patching Universe is "best effort" from the community.

Most popular GUI stuff is from universe, as are quite a few dev tools. Some examples: Gimp, Inkscape, pip (and a ton of python packages), most of gnome, a big chunk of KDE, htop, mariadb, etc.

See for yourself grep -h "^Package:" /var/lib/apt/lists/_universe__Packages | awk '{print $2}' | sort -u

Or to see only what you have installed from Universe: comm -12 <(dpkg-query -f '${Package}\n' -W | sort) <(grep -h "^Package:" /var/lib/apt/lists/_universe__Packages | awk '{print $2}' | sort -u)

A big repo isn't always better.


> Depending on the particular distro, only certain core packages are likely to get updates on LTS releases.

All LTS distros fix only some core packages sporadically as no one is able to back port all the patches esp. since most packages do not use CVEs and just fix bugs on the go. "Stable" for non-rolling distributions simply means "horribly broken and outdated".


It’s not horribly broken any more than your toaster is for not needing constant updates. Though I do have such a longstanding love/hate relationship with Ubuntu because of this. It is why it runs everywhere and just works (even powers the WSL2 defaults), but everything it provides also always so very far behind I end up recompiling so much important stuff by hand.


> It’s not horribly broken any more than your toaster is for not needing constant updates.

I don't know where this sense of "stable" in the community comes from. Software isn't perfect and gets fixed all the time. Yes, there are packages with different maintained stable branches that you can pin for your LTS distribution but this is by far the minority. For the other stuff you constantly have to work around missing features or existing bugs. E.g., why do I have to compile "jq" by myself just because the outdated package crashes on certain inputs?!


The "outdated" package, probably has all these security fixes [0]. That's why it exists - to maintain something safely. You step back from latest and greatest, to not get a compromised system the next time something goes wrong.

[0] https://sources.debian.org/patches/jq/1.7.1-6+deb13u2/


Nope, it hasn't because developers fix bugs along the way without notifying package maintainers.


You might need to expand on that. Considering the CVE patches that are on the link I just shared.


What's so hard? A developer finds a bug, fixes it, publishes a new release at some point, done. Versus someone else finds a bug, maybe opens a CVE, bug gets fixed, maintainer might notice it, backports patch and fixes (or breaks) the package. The latter CVE case is the rare case, hence all the crashes. E.g. Busybox is famous for that. They have a plethora of security issues documented in their bug tracker. Sometimes they even get fixed but most of them never get a CVE, issues stay open and you can guess if it's vulnerable or not (usually it is, don't use it).


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